Submit Program Profile to Composition Forum

Posted by – January 26, 2024

The team at Composition Forum welcomes new “Program Profiles” editors to the journal: Dr. Holland Prior, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Point Loma Nazarene University, and Dr. Joe Wilson, Assistant Professor of Composition and Literacy at Syracuse University.

We also want to thank our outgoing Program Profile editors, Dr. Crystal Fodrey and Christopher Shosted, for their incredible editorial work with the journal.

Currently, we are seeking submissions to the Program Profile section for our spring and fall issues. Program Profiles discuss the ways in which theories, research, and pedagogies shape individual college writing programs and inform programmatic initiatives. More information about the conventions of this genre and submission guidelines are available on our website

We define writing programs capaciously. We encourage profiles from programs serving students at any stage in their academic careers. Additionally, we encourage program profiles in contexts where the term “Writing Program” may not fully describe the writing work of the institution, such as in some transnational contexts.

Please feel free to contact the new Program Profiles editors with any and all questions: Holland Prior & Joe Wilson 

hprior@pointloma.edu & jwilso56@syr.edu 

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Vol. 52 of Composition Forum now available!

Posted by – December 4, 2023

Dear Colleagues, 

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 52 of Composition Forum, now available at: https://compositionforum.com/issue/52/.

This issue includes the following features:

·       An interview on play and mindfulness with Jackie Rhodes

·       A retrospective on Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders and the “composing aloud” method

·       Six articles addressing topics including mêtis in the composition classroom, circulation and virality, narrative writing assignments, peer feedback and transfer, graduate student instructors engaging in reflective writing, and the impact of a custom common textbook in FYW

·       Two program profiles describing the English Language Learner Writing Center (ELLWC) at Miami University and the Science Communication (SciComm) Undergraduate Writing Minor at the University of California, Santa Barbara

·       Three book reviews: Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing: Editors in Writing Studies (Giberson, Schoen, and Weisser, 2022), Our Body of Work: Embodied Administration and Teaching (Nicolas and Sicari, 2022), and Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition (Rushing, 2022)

Thanks for taking time to read this volume of Composition Forum, and we welcome your suggestions and comments!

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Composition Forum Call for Applications: Review Editors

Posted by – October 23, 2023

Composition Forum: A Journal of Pedagogical Theory in Rhetoric and Composition seeks a Review Editor or team of Review Editors to replace the outgoing editors. The Review Editor solicits book reviews and review essays, offers editorial feedback and revision suggestions to review authors, makes publication decisions about potential reviews, and helps to format reviews for two regular issues per year. Duties also include maintaining contact with publishers to obtain new titles, ensuring that review authors receive copies of texts, and participating in online editorial meetings. The incoming editor will shadow the current Review Editors for one production cycle. Teams of two editors are encouraged, though individuals are also welcome to apply.  

Please submit a CV and an email describing your qualifications and vision/goals for the Reviews section of Composition Forum to Christian Weisser (weisser@psu.edu). Review of applicants will begin on November 15, 2023.

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Vol. 51 of Composition Forum now available!

Posted by – May 9, 2023

Dear Colleagues, 

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 51 of Composition Forum, now available at: https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/51/.

This issue includes the following features:

·       Six articles addressing topics including interest convergence at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, graduate student mentorship, writing transfer, transdisciplinary collaboration, spatial metaphors of transfer, and attention to language.   

·       Two program profiles describing the Rhetoric and Composition minor at the College of the Holy Cross and the First-Year Composition program at the University of Central Florida.

·       Three book reviews: PARS in Practice: More Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors (Borgman and McArdle, 2021), Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillance within and beyond the Classroom (Beck and Hutchinson Campos, 2021), Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century: Recovering and Transforming the Pedagogy of Robert Scholes (Carillo, 2021).

Thanks for taking time to read this volume of Composition Forum, and we welcome your suggestions and comments! 

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Vol. 50 of Composition Forum now available!

Posted by – December 16, 2022

Dear Colleagues, 

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 50 of Composition Forum, now available at: https://compositionforum.com/issue/50/.

This issue includes the following features:

·       A retrospective on the fifty-year anniversary of Donald M. Murray’s “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product”

·       Six articles addressing topics including mindfulness and metacognition, emotion and multimodal composing, responding for transfer, multimodal pedagogy for multilingual students, a trauma-informed approach to writing program administration, and self-efficacy

·       Two program profiles describing the Writing Center at Southern University’s Baton Rouge campus and the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design (RCID) PhD program at Clemson University

·       Six book reviews: The Hidden Inequities of Labor-Based Contract Grading (Carillo, 2021), Rhetorics of Overcoming: Rewriting Narratives of Disability and Accessibility in Writing Studies (Hitt, 2021), Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods (Lockett, Ruiz, Sanchez, Carter, 2021), Teaching Critical Reading and Writing in the Era of Fake News (Carillo and Horning, 2020), Composition and Big Data (Licastro and Miller, 2021), Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age of Misinformation and Disinformation (Lockhart, Glascott, Warnick, Parrish, Lewis, 2021)

Thanks for taking time to read this volume of Composition Forum, and we welcome your suggestions and comments!

Vol. 49 of Composition Forum now available!

Posted by – September 15, 2022

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 49 of Composition Forum, a special issue on the discourse-based interview guest edited by Neil Baird and Bradley Dilger. You can access the special issue here: https://compositionforum.com/issue/49/.

Thanks for taking time to read this issue, and we welcome your suggestions and comments!

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Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Composition Forum: “Contemplative and Mindful-Based Pedagogies for Writing Ourselves and the World”

Posted by – July 11, 2022

Guest editors: Paula Mathieu, Boston College, and Angela Muir, Boston College

Amid another academic year shaped by the pandemic, a crumbling economy, and a critical human rights movement, professors struggle to align to a pedagogy that is both supportive and rigorous. The latest Healthy Minds survey shows that mental health issues such as anxiety and depression are at a record high of 47% among students, and an outstanding number of those students are reaching out to their professors for support. In a recent roundtable at Boston College on Trauma-Informed Contemplative Pedagogies, Professor Oh Myo Kim (CDEP, LSEHD) responded, “Class time is not therapy, but can be therapeutic.” Resources on contemplative pedagogies and contemplative practices have been increasingly highlighted in higher education. 

Contemplative practices (also sometimes referred to as mindfulness or awareness practices) in the classroom are getting headlines because they help students increase focus, calm their sympathetic nervous systems, and address the sense of overwhelm experienced within the wake of an ongoing global pandemic, increased attention to escalating racial violence, shifts between online and in-person learning, and intensifying climate disasters. Certainly, writers and their instructors need to be able to cultivate a calm presence in order to work, trust, and learn together. In addition, as this special issue will argue, contemplative pedagogies represent an important intervention in this current moment, not only to help equip individuals with greater resilience, but as a vital tool to help people engage the hard work of racial reckoning, engaging political differences, and healing our planet. In other words, we see contemplative pedagogy as a way to help writing achieve the transformative potential that composition theorists (Berlin, Trimbur, Schor) have long advocated.

This special issue of Composition Forum will address the what, why, how, and why now of contemplative writing pedagogy, while tracing its long roots within the history composition and writing studies:

  • How do we define contemplation and what are the assumptions, traditions and ideas underlying its many pedagogies?
  • What do contemplative pedagogies aim for? What do they accomplish? How do they contribute to other writing pedagogies?
  • Why and how might one adopt contemplative approaches to writing? What are the theoretical, neuroscientific, and writerly reasons to explore contemplative pedagogies?
  • Why do contemplative pedagogies seem especially urgent in this historical moment? How can contemplative approaches help support anti-racist, anti-ablist, and environmental approaches to writing instruction?

This issue will build upon and extend the argument Robert Yagelski made in Writing as a Way of Being (2011), which contends that writing instruction in secondary and post-secondary schools fails to live up to its progressive promises, despite advances in pedagogical theories.  He argues that “conventional writing instruction and assessment continue to operate on the assumption that writing is a sometimes challenging but relatively straightforward conduit for meaning” (24). Even social and post-process theories, argues Yagelski, fall short of their radical potential because of a tacit embrace of Cartesian dualism, which posits the self as an autonomous being, the world as separate and knowable from the knower, and language as a relatively unproblematic conduit for thought (45).  


Contemplative pedagogies aim to help students see writing as part of how we learn to be in the world, as a tool for living, and as a collaborative means of shared inquiry toward intersubjective truth, both within educational settings and without.

The nature of contemplative practice is fluid, so we are open to creative and experimental forms. In addition to scholarly articles, we are interested in interviews, personal reflections, book reviews, and course designs. 

You are welcome to submit a proposal of 250 to 500 words, final drafts should be between 2500 to 6000 words. Send all submissions to contemplativecomp@gmail.com

Timeline:

Proposals: September 1, 2022

Drafts: January 1, 2023

Feedback Distributed: March 2023

Final Drafts: May 1, 2023

Paula Mathieu is an Associate Professor of English at Boston College and director of the university’s First-Year Writing program. She has been speaking and publishing about mindfulness and contemplative pedagogies since 2013. She is the 2021 recipient of the Coalition for Community Writing Engaged Scholar Award.

Angela Muir holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. She is a 200 RYT in Hatha and Tantra from the Hawaii School of Yoga and has taught yoga, meditation, yoga philosophy and creative writing courses in San Francisco and Seattle. She is currently a graduate student and teaching fellow at Boston College pursuing research on contemplative pedagogies.

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Vol. 48 of Composition Forum now available!

Posted by – May 11, 2022

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 48 of Composition Forum, now available at: https://compositionforum.com/issue/48/.

This issue includes the following features:

·       An interview with Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe

·       Six articles addressing topics including disability and accessibility, problem-exploring in first-year writing, hybrid and online peer review, work-integrated learning and writing transfer, long-term writing development, and gestural listening

·       A program profile describing the Faculty Writing Fellows program at Curry College

·       Two book reviews: Institutional Literacies: Engaging Academic IT Contexts for Writing and Communication (Selber, 2020), English Studies Online: Programs, Practices, and Possibilities (Banks and Spangler, 2021)

Thanks for taking time to read this volume of Composition Forum, and we welcome your suggestions and comments!

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Call for Fall 2022 Book Reviews

Posted by – March 1, 2022

Hello, all!

Composition Forum is now soliciting traditional or multimodal book reviews for our Fall 2022 issue and upcoming issues. We encourage you to widely distribute this call to your graduate programs and professional networks. If you or your students are interested, please email us at reviews@compositionforum.com by Monday, April 11, 2022.


Composition Forum publishes reviews of books, websites, and other texts that may be of interest to teachers and scholars of writing. Single reviews are generally 1500 words, and review essays are approximately 2500 words. Multimodal reviews are also encouraged and might include podcasts or video-based reviews. What follows is a list of books currently available for review (please note that some of these titles are available in PDF or hard-copy form, depending on the publisher):

●      Rhetorics of Overcoming: Rewriting Narratives of Disability and Accessibility in Writing Studies by Allison Harper Hitt

●      PARS in Practice, edited by Jessie Borgman & Casey McArdle.

●      Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age of Misinformation and Disinformation, edited by Tara Lockhart, Brenda Glascott, Chris Warnick, Juli Parrish, and Justin Lewis

●      Translingual Pedagogical Perspectives: Engaging Domestic and International Students in the Composition Classroom, edited by Julia E. Kiernan, Alanna Frost & Suzanne Blum Malley

●      Effective Teaching of Technical Communication: Theory, Practice, and Application, edited by Michael J. Kleins

●      Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ellen C. Carillo

●      Composition and Big Data, edited by Amanda Licastro and Benjamin M. Miller

●      Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing by John R. Gallagher

●      Postprocess Postmortem, by Kristopher M. Lotier

●      Working with and against Shared Curricula: Perspectives from College Writing Teachers and Administrators, edited by Connie Kendall Theado and Samantha NeCamp

●      English Studies Online: Programs, Practices, Possibilities, edited by William P. Banks and Susan Spangler

●      Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing, edited by J. Michael Rifenburg, Patricia Portanova, and Duane Roen

●      Teaching Critical Reading and Writing in the Era of Fake News, edited by Ellen C. Carillo Alice S. Horning

●      Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies: Ethics, Public Policy, and Research Design, by Johanna Phelps

●      English Across the Curriculum: Voices from Around the World, edited by Bruce Morrison, Julia Chen, Linda Lin, and Alan Urmston

●      Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillance within and beyond the Classroom, edited by Estee Beck & Les Hutchinson Campos

●      Digital Writing: A Guide to Writing for Social Media and the Web, by Daniel Lawrence

●      Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story, edited by Heather Ostman, Howard Tinberg, and Danizete Martínez

●      Civic Engagement in Global Contexts: International Education, Community Partnerships, and Higher Education, edited by Jim Bowman and Jennifer deWinter

●      Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods, by Alexandria Lockett, Iris D. Ruiz, James Chase Sanchez, and Christopher Carter

●      The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading, by Ellen C. Carillo

You are also welcome to propose a book not on this list but that aligns with Composition Forum’s scope of interest. We will review responses and select reviewers as soon as possible. Fall 2022 issues reviews are due in late July 2022. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Sincerely,

Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Rachel Daugherty

Composition Forum Web Editor-in-Training

Posted by – March 1, 2022

Composition Forum is looking to expand its web editor staff!

We’re looking to take on a web editor-in-training to learn the ropes of preparing issues for publication and collaborating on a new design for the journal.

You don’t have to be an expert web designer, but we’re looking for someone who has some knowledge of HTML and CSS and an interest in Web standards and accessibility-oriented practices. You’ll end up working with PHP and JavaScript as well, but no existing knowledge of either is necessary—only the willingness to try it out.

If this sounds like something that interests you, please reach out to Kevin Brock (webeditor@compositionforum.com) to learn more and get involved!